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Thanks to their 11-game winning streak, the Blue Jays have rekindled hope in Toronto that a post-season berth remains a possibility.

Social media lit up Monday with claims that every team that had an 11-game winning streak went on to make the playoffs.

In reality, the Jays must win two-thirds of their remaining games to attain that post-season berth.

Factor in the extra wild-card spot this season and Toronto’s chances are better still. But the club would still need to win at least 56 of their remaining 88 games to reach the 94-win plateau that would seemingly guarantee a berth.

Anything at or over 97 wins and the Jays are in, at least according to website sportsclubstats.com. The site uses an algorithm based on team’s current records and games remaining to calculate how they will finish at the end of the regular season. Based on that standard, the Jays would have to win 59 games over the remainder of the season.

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Should the Jays finish with 94 to 96 wins, they’d have a 100 per cent chance of making the post-season, again, this according to sportsclubstats.com.

Thanks to their winning streak, Toronto has improved its odds to reach the playoffs, according to the website. Toronto now rates a 14.5 per cent chance at the post-season. When they started the season at 9-17, the site rated them as having a 0.6 per cent chance.

Several other websites also see the Jays as a better bet to make the post-season.

Over at Coolstandings.com, Toronto’s chances are 9.2 per cent to win the division, 19 per cent to earn a wild card and 28.2 per cent chance to make the playoffs.

Adam Burns, the sports book manager for Bodog.ca, said in a release that in the wake of this 11-game winning streak, he has been repeatedly asked about the Jays’ odds.

“Two weeks ago, I offered the Jays at 40-1 to win the World Series after entering the season as 7-1 favourites . . . as of (Monday), the Jays are all the way down to 12-1, and the second favourite at 5-2 to win the very competitive AL East behind the Red Sox, who sit at 9-4,” Burns said.

Still, history says Toronto is facing a hugely difficult task to compensate for that poor start. Fangraphs.com studied major league teams over the past 10 years and looked at teams with a winning percentage below .400 on May 1 and who were at least seven games out of first place. Toronto showed a .370 percentage and were 8 1/2 games off the pace. Only 30 teams over the past decade fall into that category. Of the 30, only one — the 2006 Minnesota Twins — made the post-season.

Elias Sports took a look at teams over the past 30 years which started at 9-17 and found only three that rebounded to play post-season ball.

The most popular cited example among those three teams are the 2001 Oakland A’s, which won only eight of their first 26 games but took a wild-card spot by finishing the season 102-60. The 1984 Kansas City Royals opened 9-17 but finished 84-78 to win the West Division.

The third team was Cito Gaston’s Blue Jays. In 1989, when Gaston took over the manager’s post after a 12-24 start, Toronto won 76 of its next 122 games to take the AL East Division at 89-73.

And there is the argument of how many wins it will take to enter the post-season. At the moment, the always tough AL East is the only division in baseball where all teams are over .500.

With such a competitive division, it could raise the question of whether, say, 97 wins is too high a number to win the pennant. That number could come down should all the teams “beat each other up” and register records of around .500 in divisional play.

Still, it appears the Jays will have to play at or over a .600 winning percentage the rest of the way to entertain hopes of playoff baseball. Of the 30 teams on Fangraphs’ decade long list, the ’06 Twins were the only team to play over .600 (and the only team to make the post-season). Only six of the 30 teams went on to play .500 ball or better.

Flash back to just before the start of spring training, and there wasn’t a website, expert, or writer who didn’t include the Jays as odds-on favourites to win the World Series.

Toronto was as high as 15-2 to win the World Series in Las Vegas; by the end of April, though, they were 25-1.

The Blue Jays themselves shrug off odds, numbers and even critics, who rightly characterized the team as a major disappointment after a dismal opening month.

The players simply want to restore good baseball as an everyday practice, and they’ve accomplished that.

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